Why can’t our state allow access to records to help enhance confidence?
According to Rasmussen, approximately 66% of likely voters don’t trust our electronic voting systems. Could this be the reason for our state’s abysmal turnout in the primary of roughly 13%?
This should concern every election official and legislator. Instead, they excoriate those who question the elections and who request information to confirm the validity of the election process. To wit, our own SC Election Commission is still trying to sue SC Safe Elections, our grassroots group, for daring to ask for information about the 2020 election (namely Cast Vote Records). They won’t give up on their counterclaim that basically wants to prevent us from obtaining, via the South Carolina Freedom of Information Act, ANY information from the 2020 election as well as pay thousands of dollars of their legal costs. This is harassment in the form of overzealous lawyers spending our tax dollars to punish citizens for requesting records that help us validate our elections. We certainly hope that Judge Coble sees this for what it is and either dismisses (again) their counterclaim; or better yet, awards us our legal fees and admonishes the otehr side for their brute force tactics.
Dr. Daugherity, one of our expert witnesses, wrote an excellent article, “Balancing Ballot Secrecy Versus Transparency”, that succinctly underscores the importance of Cast Vote Records. In this must-read article, he provides the history of the secret ballot and emphasizes the importance of voter transparency. It is essential that states not only comply with our federal and state laws but that they also provide access to these records to ensure increased confidence in our election results.
He states:
“Every CPA or financial officer knows what is necessary for a complete and verifiable audit—physical security, inventory, chain of custody, separation of duties, a complete audit trail, and so on. In everyday language, there must be sufficient data to reconstruct and trace all transactions, in effect to be able to make a “movie” after the fact of everything that happened before, during, and after an election.”
When our election officials ask us to trust the system but don’t provide key reports and records it only foments distrust and suspicion. See the article below:
